When Jim Rochford was a boy growing up on a property near present day Canberra he walked each day to a small bush school - a journey of between two and three miles. Other children walked up to five miles, some barefoot as their family could not afford boots. They were tough times.

Jim was born in August 1913, and has lived almost all his life in and around the village of Hall in the ACT. He's the person who's lived the longest in the Canberra region and he has many stories about a world which no longer exists, when, for example, Queanbeyan rather than Canberra was biggest town in the district.

The day after he arrived in Australia from Ireland in the 1860s, Jim's grandfather set out to walk from Melbourne to Queanbeyan to meet up with his brother. According to Jim he killed a snake on the journey.

"There weren't many people about, I don't know how he found his way," he says. "There was practically no road - wasn't much of a road even when I grew up, still wasn't much of a road."

Jim remembers that people walked everywhere, though some were lucky enough to have horses and his father and uncles had a bullock team that they used for contract work and to collect supplies that came down to Queanbeyan from Sydney.

His parents were George and Alice Rochford who ran a small farm called "Forest View". Jim was the third of their seven children and he describes his parents as "honest people" who would have had to "battle to get a start".

They lived in a slab building with a stone fireplace and the children worked on the farm as well as attending school, looking after the chickens and the vegetable garden.

Depression years

Jim left school just as the Great Depression hit - there was no work. But he got by as casual farm labourer and later joined a shearing team as a rouseabout, travelling throughout New South Wales.

He says people today can't understand how difficult those times were, but they were marked, he explains, by "an honour and a kindness" in the community.

"If your crop failed... someone else would share theirs with you and so on."

Towards the end of the 1930s Jim took over the old blacksmith's workshop in Hall and turned it into a garage, repairing cars and agricultural machinery.

When World War Two began he joined the army for five and a half years, serving in New Guinea.

"It was a cruel few years that I spent in New Guinea... but there was a kind feeling between the troops, I mean our own troops. We all seemed to be opposed to the opposite."

Community work

After the war Jim returned to Hall, expanded his business and threw himself into working for his community.

"I came back with a will to rebuild the old garage as something that would be of assistance for the village and it became that."

He was also instrumental in securing essential services for the village such as electricity, and when a new hospital was being built in Canberra he joined - as the only male - the hospital auxiliary and raised thousands of dollars through an annual art show.

He organised the art show with his friend Averil Muller who now cares for him at his home in Hall and at her property on the South Coast.

Jim never married (he claims he had no time) but still has many friends in the Hall community and fond memories of those no longer alive.

"Everybody was kind to me...they were gentle people."

He prizes honesty, kindness and fairness and nominates the help he received from others in supporting his ideas as what's meant the most in his long life.

"After the war," he says, "any sense of kindness seemed to register."

Jim says he's not thinking much about his 100th birthday.

"Life is short and we've got to make (the) most we can of it, help one another is the important thing and honesty and fairness is important - so simple really."